Like any large company, Microsoft’s no stranger to frivolous patent filings, either for questionably vague technological advancements or for inventions that should rightfully be credited to other individuals. That said, they seem to be on a roll lately. Just a few weeks ago, in fact, Microsoft attempted to patent a type of “sudo” command, despite the fact that it had been used in Unix environments for over three decades. Before the dust has even settled on that patent application, though, Microsoft has gone ahead and filed another one, for “sparklines in the grid.” The problem? Sparklines were invented by someone else entirely decades ago: Edward Tufte.

You may not know the word, but you’ve seen sparklines. It’s basically an in-line graph showing trends and variations across some scale of measurement, no taller than the line of text on which it rests. Ever seen a graph in-line next to a newspaper’s listing for the end-of-day Dow Jones value? That’s a sparkline.

Microsoft’s patent claim deals with putting sparklines in spreadsheets in Excel 2010, but the patent is vague enough to apply to all sparklines. As Tuftes says on his blog: “The title of their patent submission is “Sparklines in the grid.” Note the title is not “Sparklines in Excel.” Every data table has a grid, sometimes invisible, sometimes with little ordered boxes. Nearly all typography has an underlying grid, so even a sparkline embedded in a sentence might qualify as a “sparkline in a grid.” And, of course, every spreadsheet has a grid. The claims involve software code that constructs and possibly drives those sparklines in the grid. All sparklines are produced by software code, one way or another. Although masked by the language of patent legalese, the claims, when taken at their word, are in fact extremely broad.”

Tufte concludes: “What Microsoft’s patent claims demonstrate is the ridiculous state of the US patent system and of those who seek to exploit that system.” Yes, it certainly does, but at this point, does it even need demonstrating?